Up, up and away

The Man Who Touched the Sky by Johnny Acton, Hodder and Stoughton, £14.99, ISBN 0340819324 Reviewed by Roy Herbert

FLICK through this book to look at the illustrations, as many people might do, and you risk suffering a sudden sick feeling and a flash of vertigo. It shows the author as he steps out of a balloon 102,800 feet up.

When you get your breath back you might begin to read the book, only to find that it's not about that astonishing leap, but about the early balloon flights in the 18th century. Not again! Montgolfier and his sheep and cockerel and duck and the rest of it? Yes. But The Man Who Touched the Sky is written with such liveliness and fluency that it all seems new and as marvellous as contemporaries thought it.

Johnny Acton, still with this easy style, goes on to deal with the development of ...

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